Our Lady of Angels School fire

Tribune archive photo

Firemen rescue an injured girl from the Lady of Angels school's second floor, after a fire sent twelve hundred students scrambling for their lives. Three nuns and 87 children died the day of the fire and in the following months five more children died from wounds.

Firemen rescue an injured girl from the Lady of Angels school's second floor, after a fire sent twelve hundred students scrambling for their lives. Three nuns and 87 children died the day of the fire and in the following months five more children died from wounds. (Tribune archive photo)

Bob SecterChicago Tribune

At 2:40 p.m. on this chilly Monday, the time of day when fidgeting youngsters count the minutes to the final bell, a billowing and blinding mass of flames, smoke and gas burst out on the second floor of Our Lady of the Angels School. Within seconds, 1,200 students at the Catholic school were scrambling for their lives, many leaping from windows to escape the inferno.

The fire had begun in a paper-filled waste barrel at the bottom of a stairwell of the West Side school. After smoldering for several minutes, the blaze shot up like a cannonball into a crawlspace above the second floor and then burned its way through to the classrooms beneath. The 2 1/2-story brick-and-wood building was almost defenseless against the flames. There was no sprinkler system, and only the first floor had a fire door. Because the school's fire alarm was not connected to the fire department, it took at least two minutes from the first sight of flames before the fire department got word of the blaze. Another three minutes--almost an eternity in such catastrophes--elapsed before emergency equipment arrived on the scene.

By then, panicked children had already begun to jump from the upper floor, where 5th through 8th graders were taught, landing in heaps on top of each other. From an upper window, a nun screamed, "We are trapped! We are trapped!" A passing milkman saw the smoke, ran inside and dragged 10 pupils to safety, including one girl frozen in terror on a stairwell who was blocking the escape of others. Among the horrified crowd that gathered outside was a woman with tears streaming down her face. Apparently unable to speak English, she waved a grimy, wrinkled scrap of paper in front of firemen and others in the crowd. It read: "Mary . . . Room 209."

Three nuns and 87 children perished that day. During the following months, five more children died from their wounds. In the fire's wake, the city ordered sprinklers installed in all schools and linked school alarms to fire department alarm systems. In 1961, a former Our Lady student, a 5th grader when the fire erupted, confessed to starting the fire, but he recanted at court hearings. A judge held him responsible for other arson blazes but refused to pin him with blame for the school fire. The cause was never officially determined.